[My position as a writer is to allow the voice of those who are anonymous and oppressed by the economic elite, always hungry for more blood, money, and power, to be heard. But how to talk about that with writing a “heavy” novel? It’s what I ask myself every morning when I enter the room where I work. I do it by diving into daily life, a river that carries everything in its journey: the personal drama along with the historical events. You only need to follow the life (without protection) of an ordinary individual to see an entire age unfold. Plus, I have it on principle that I never give the primary importance to a dictator. My goal is to expose in its multiple facets, the lives of people for whom the dictatorship has limited their development. This morality weaves through all of my novels.]

[If it’s impossible in life, then it’s up to literature to intervene in how life unfolds. An artist can’t be perceived as just an admirer of God, but His rival. By manipulating reality, we will finish, one hopes, of changing it. And by touching a fundamental element of life: time. Of our apprehension at times of moving forward. But the poet refuses linear time. He just doesn’t see it that way. Time is more like what Borges describes, a labyrinth. We can get lost.]

[I also speak of tenderness. In Le goût des jeunes filles, for the first time, women from the lower classes are given a chance to speak, young women who lived across the street from my house. These young women were almost like prostitutes. And it wasn’t me who was speaking in their name; they liberally expressed themselves throughout the novel, talking about their misery, their joy, they outlook on life. I wanted to give them back their human dignity, show what the dictatorships did to Haitian women. It is one of the rare Haitian novels that features 12 women as main characters.

The first and last quotes have quite a lot to do with the project I am now working on, which is understanding the different rewrites of Le goût des jeunes filles; why does Laferrière create an entirely new character, a upper-class woman who is “slumming it”, and insert her first-person diary account of those same events? I think it has to do with the question of authenticity; is the upper-class woman’s voice a more “authentic” view of the women than the lower-class males? Is form also an issue, as the upper-class woman’s diary, once published, goes on to become a world-wide phenomenon while Laferrière’s novel remains in relative obscurity?

More generally, looking at Laferrière’s entire oeuvre, I think it’s interesting to look at his rewriting in terms of the labyrinth of time as he describes it in the second quote. I’ve always suspected that one of the reasons why Laferrière is so elusive in terms of his identity and story is because it allows him to control his own life, control that his father and so many of his friends and family lost to the dictatorships. If superstition lead Da to tell Vieux Os never to reveal his true name, lest that person own your soul, a more pragmatic reason lead Dany to become known as Dany rather than Windsor Kléber Laferrière after his father: fear of Papa Doc. His name, his writing, and his life are his own, and it would seem that he’s going to do whatever he feels like doing with them, in reality and in “fiction.”